That is all the Negro asks--that is all the friends of law and order need
to ask, for once the law of the land is supreme, no individual who commits
crime will escape punishment.

Individual Negroes commit crimes the same as do white men, but that the
Negro race is peculiarly given to assault upon women, is a falsehood of
the deepest dye. The tables given above show that the Negro who is saucy
to white men is lynched as well as the Negro who is charged with assault
upon women. Less than one-sixth of the lynchings last year, 1899, were
charged with rape.

The Negro points to his record during the war in rebuttal of this false
slander. When the white women and children of the South had no protector
save only these Negroes, not one instance is known where the trust was
betrayed. It is remarkably strange that the Negro had more respect for
womanhood with the white men of the South hundreds of miles away, than
they have today, when surrounded by those who take their lives with
impunity and burn and torture, even worse than the "unspeakable Turk."

Again, the white women of the North came South years ago, threaded the
forests, visited the cabins, taught the schools and associated only with
the Negroes whom they came to teach, and had no protectors near at hand.
They had no charge or complaint to make of the danger to themselves after
association with this class of human beings. Not once has the country been
shocked by such recitals from them as come from the women who are
surrounded by their husbands, brothers, lovers and friends. If the Negro's
nature is bestial, it certainly should have proved itself in one of these
two instances. The Negro asks only justice and an impartial consideration
of these facts.